Post navigation

Michael ‘Enrei’ Camele

Hello, greetings, and whatever other introductions you feel are necessary! I may know some of you already, many of you have probably never heard of me, and I am sure a handful of you could care less who I am. For those who already know me, yes, Enrei does have a real, legal, and unchanging name! For those of you who have no idea who I am, hold your questions for later, and just know now that I, the guy in that little picture in the upper right hand corner, will be joining the review staff; consider yourself lucky, not many people get a free ticket to hear me talk about games! Really!

I have been playing games since the day I could pick up my father’s bulky GameGear. I do not remember beating the games he owned, but I easily remember the hours I spent with the neighborhood kids crowded around me watching to see if I could reach a new level in my newest Sonic the Hedgehog game. After a few years of Sonic and Mario, and even fewer years in school, I moved on to the PlayStation and Game Boy. With my new found ability to read, I started enjoying games set in fantastic worlds, with stories and goals I could never have imagined in my days of running, jumping, and coin collecting. A major facet of my early reading based gaming was a little game series called Pokemon, and we all know how that series ended up.

Some of my favorite games from that era were Mega Man Legends, Guardian’s Crusade, Chocobo’s Dungeon, and Klonoa. While the gameplay was hardly unique, each game’s aesthetics and story really impressed me when I was younger, and had an impact on my preferences over all these years. With the exception of the side-scrolling platformer, Klonoa, these games served as my starting point for their respective genres and series. The Mega Man series as a whole caused me to want harder and harder games to play, even if it meant I may never beat them. By this time, both Mega Man and Final Fantasy had a pretty large series library, which gave me plenty of old games to hunt down and try while the rest of the average gaming world was moving onward to their fancy graphics and FPS games.

The amount of attention I could devote to one game’s story really began to dwindle in the GameCube era, where it seemed like every RPG was being released two discs at a time, with hours upon hours of story. I did suffer through a few titles like that, but I spent a majority of my GameCube days exploring the world of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, creating a new character in Phantasy Star Online, or beginning a new year in Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. I started to want a very free, hands-off, sort of system in every game I played, I could care less if I saved that thing from the evil guy, I just wanted to see what was on the other side of that mountain, or what treasure might lie in that ruined keep.

Now, though, I would like to think I keep a good balance between my long attention draining games and my exploration crazy adventures. That is not to say that I have an easy time playing long games for hours on end, rather, if I am gaming anywhere near my computer I feel compelled to constantly flip through all my social platforms, which does lead to my play time increasing, even if I hardly make it out of one battle.

You can look forward to my first real article soon, hopefully I can avoid stepping on any toes with my reviews! Feel free to add me on whichever social thing floats your boat, too!